Intro Constant Contact Year In Review

Constant Contact have been in the email marketing video game since 1995. During that time they have managed to turn into one of the most used email tools in the world. Constant Contact Year In Review

What Makes them special is that they have added several features over the years that not one of their competitors sport, like surveys, an event management tool, and campaigns. These all add to the list of options in addition to automations and newsletters.

In Addition to these options, they also boast a Marketplace with over 400 apps and integrations which cater for even the most market of products. Yet despite these numbers and attributes, curiosity about Constant Contact seems to be on the decrease, at least according to Google Trends. Enough reason for us to have a look at Constant Contact’s ins &amp; outs and check whether it’s still relevant in the 21st century.

If you are choosing an email Marketing tool for the small business, you could do a lot worse than Constant Contact (which begins at $20 per month). Then the business provides a 6-day free trial if you want to test out some of the features without committing. This review looks at the Email program, which supports up to 500 contacts. Were it not for some technical hiccups that were unexplained, Constant Contact might have been an easy pick for our first choice.

How Can Constant Contact pile up against the Contest for businesses with 2,500 contacts? It carries a high price that is $45-per-month. Email advertising tools have a limit on but Constant Contact does not.

Since our last appearance, Constant Contact has Email autoresponders beyond these triggered such as anniversaries and birthdays. You can even send an email series to a set of contacts, like a day-by-day guide to getting started with your service or follow-ups to an event. This works by matching them up with autoresponders and segmenting your contacts. The picture library allows 2 GB of storage, with a maximum file size of 5MB. Users may also access stock photographs that are paid and free through Constant Contact. Finally, you can now interact with assistance via Twitter. Constant Contact Year In Review

Customer Support

Constant Contact is Simple to Use and has lots Of help options, beginning with the data icons helpfully located alongside fields and choices explaining what they are, extensive Knowledge Base trainers accessible, and articles. Constant Contact has an Activity page that lists the status of various jobs, such as contacts that are uploaded, so you know what is going on in the background.

Phone support Isn’t 24/7 but the hours are Still pretty generous, moving from 7 a.m. to 11 pm throughout the week, and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekends. Chat is available, and the agents will call you to make sure to have all of the information that you need.

Pricing and Features

Constant Contact offers a number of programs Based on the size of your subscriber base. The plan is $20 a month for up to 500 subscribers and $45 for up to 2,500. A plan costs $195 for 10,000 subscribers and $335 for 50,000. Price-wise, it’s not too different from Campaigner. You can sign up for additional add-on providers, for example EventSpot ($20 a month for a single occasion; $25 for up to five events) for event registrations, and research ($10 per month) to run polls (all of which can be included at no extra charge on the Mail Plus program ). The Basic account comes with a Library to store images used in the campaigns. MyLibrary Plus ($5 per month) expands your storage to 1 GB. Newsletter Archive ($5 a month) creates a widget which can be added to your site on which you can display links to up to 100 mails. If you want your customers to be able to see your messages, this is a.

The free trial gives you access to all You can just send up to 100 emails although these features for 60 days. The trial is a great way to get used to the platform for a restricted number of messages. When you’re certain about the platform, upgrade to the paid version and get started blasting away. There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee, which can be unusual in this space.

Campaigns

When you are ready to create a newsletter, you Can use the template to get started. The editing application allows you tweak colours, pictures, and text messages. There is also a media library where you are able to store your personal resources, such as company logos and other images. Constant Contact Year In Review

Once you’re satisfied with your own newsletter, You can send it right away or schedule it for after (in 5-minute intervals, for example 3:05 a.m., 3:10 a.m., and so forth ). We couldn’t find a recurring schedule to send messages on a daily, weekly, or yearly basis the way Campaigner doesto send messages based on the local time in the recipient’s place, as GetResponse can.

The company also recently announced a new Attribute named Action Blocks, which allow marketers to add polls or RSVP blocks to standard emails. This permits recipients to respond to messages with a single click without having to leave the email inbox and also visit some web page.

Tracking Campaigns

You are able to monitor once you’ve sent a newsletter using the Reports tab, its success. The dashboard displays the basics, such as opens, clickthroughs, bounces, and unsubscribe requests. A useful bar chart shows open prices and a chart compares performance over multiple campaigns. Users can also pick up to five mails to compare high-level results side by side. The report has a convenient Refresh button so you may see real-time results. It is not like MailChimp where you’ve got to manually load the webpages. When we opened emails and clicked on the links, they were registered nearly instantly.

The Resource Center offers links to Information about typical clickthrough rates by business. You may also look at relative metrics to find out if your level of involvement with your customers is improving or declining over the previous 3 months. The mobile app is handy if you want to observe the campaign functionality from your mobile device.

Lists

There are several ways to add contacts to Constant Contact: copy and paste, manually sort addresses into a type, upload a file (CSV, XLS, XLSX, or TXT), import from Gmail, or pull from Outlook and other (CRM) tools.

When we used the form Speech, we received an error message but it didn’t state what had gone wrong. We were motivated to hit on the Previous button to return and resolve the problem but we could not because the page had expired out of our browser (Firefox) cache. After a few tries, the whole page crashed. This was an odd experience, to say the least. Constant Contact has ensured us has greatly improved since our first test and that this is not likely to happen again.

The file upload import, and CRM Migration options, on the other hand, were easy to use and stable. We think most people would end up using these choices. We tracked the upload progress under”Contacts: Task” and was informed when the import was complete. Like Campaigner, Constant Contact allows Mailinator and other addresses that are disposable. It’s too bad many services do not comply with the example of GetResponse$15.00 in GetResponse, which filters out famous disposable domains. Constant Contact rather flags contacts that are likely so the user can choose whether to eliminate or keep them to be other or transactional such addresses.

Segments are initially based on that list you. Select if saving the contacts but it’s also quite simple to go back and change the list. From the Contact Manager, we clicked on the addresses we wanted to add to a different list. A new feature enables users to choose a list for contacts to be added to whenever they click on on a specific link within an email, the business said. This attribute is available in most packages. It may be paired with an autoresponder so that, when a contact clicks a link, there is a relevant email delivered to them. Constant Contact lets you assign tags to contacts, which can be helpful if you want to track things such as the way they signed up, if they are loyalty associates, or whatever else you may want to monitor. Constant Contact Year In Review

Our only quibble with the Contact Manager is That it’s a hassle to edit the user records. When we pasted our list and cut, we dropped in email addresses. We didn’t have other fields, such as name or address. We needed to load each individual listing and update the fields, to add this. Because the pages were slow to load in our testing, this was straightforward. Since we could see the whole list in Contact Manager, then it might have been nice to be able to just click on the lost area, input, and just keep going straight down the page. Lesson learned: Be certain to have each of the relevant fields before uploading the titles populated from the list.

Constant Contact also enables you to create forms That customers can use to register for newsletters and emails. These forms may be hosted either on your site or on Constant Contact’s servers. You can section the users based on if they used other methods or the form, which may be useful. The business also recently announced a new sign-up form editor that is designed to allow users to create inline forms which can be embedded onto a site as well as pop-up forms that can be customized to show after a fixed amount of time or when a visitor attempts to leave the website, the company stated.

Constant Contact requires you to confirm that You have consent from your list! You also cannot use set addresses like [email protected] or [email protected] addresses or distribution lists since there is no way to confirm you’ve got permission from each person receiving messages. You might create autoresponders, listed under the button, to send every time a user is added to a list. We used the templates to build a newsletter .

Drawbacks

Constant Contact generally feels like a Stage but its error messages were disconcerting. This aside, the instrument is strong, and for businesses Constant Contact is a fantastic way to get started. We want it provided flexibility in the scheduling of production and campaigns of autoresponders. Constant Contact Year In Review

If you don’t need these features, Then Constant Contact is an excellent choice. If you want a bit more flexibility in your marketing plan, then have a look at email marketing Editors’ Choices Campaigner and MailChimp.

Automation

Because Constant Contact only offers seven Various sorts of advertising automation functions doesn’t want to refer to itself as a advertising and marketing automation suite that is traditional. Instead, Constant Contact likes to tell prospects that it is a cross between email advertising and marketing automation or what it calls”email automation.”

That is because, unlike other tools, for example Editors’ Choice marketing automation platforms Pardot and HubSpot, Constant Contact does not does not provide branching logic. Instead, it focuses on just two triggers to begin automation campaigns. For example, you can start an automation workflow whenever someone accomplishes a landmark, like a birthday or anniversary as a customer or joins a list. However, you can’t alter automationsbased on whether someone opened an email, forwarded an email, or clicked on a link.

Automation platforms automatic, slightly more intelligent and, well, compared to marketing tools, create life more easy for marketers and personalized for customers. In addition, Constant Contact doesn’t provide A/B testing (they do provide subject line A/B testing), no research advertising addition, and the restricted workflows you can create do not offer you drag-and-drop builders, that can be pretty much standard nowadays. Should you need automation for second and first interactions with clients Constant Contact is a automation program. However, if you would like adaptive workflows and sequencing that adjust to your customers’ specific activities, then Constant Contact isn’t powerful enough to compete in the marketing automation area.

Wrap-up

As Constant Contact themselves reiterate through their website, they’re a tool for smaller companies. And, as it is well worth assessing them on those terms. They definitely have enough of the basics covered to meet companies as stated above, and then we’d recommend them highly if it had been as straightforward as that. Constant Contact Year In Review

These days, the Matter, is that there are Lots of other email Tools offering even more than Constant Contact, and also for a whole lot less cash. This includes user experience, but also not only attributes. In fact, for the volume you pay with Constant Contact, you might end up using tools such as GetResponse and ActiveCampaign.

They do pick things up For their adequate deliverability rates, integrations (particularly social websites integrations), also for enabling different access levels for separate users. With recent improvements to promotion automation and coverage, it does seem like they’re making an attempt. But their lack of features, such as marketing automation, which makes it difficult to recommend over others at their price point. Constant Contact Year In Review